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In Both Houses, Fortifying Support for Rival Plans

Speaker John A. Boehner walked through a basement corridor in the Capitol on Wednesday after an afternoon caucus with House Republicans on legislation to raise the nation's debt ceiling.Credit
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — House Republicans and Senate Democrats gained substantial support on Wednesday within party ranks for their separate plans to resolve a looming debt crisis, but the momentum seemed to be pushing both sides further from a compromise.

It was a day in which Capitol Hill seemed to operate in alternate realities: Republicans in the House sharing near universal belief that the Senate will eventually cave and accept their plan, and Senate Democrats assured that they will have the last word over the weekend and ultimately force the hand of the House.

As the House headed for a vote on Thursday, Congressional officials suggested that Senate leaders from both parties were keeping an open line for a potential compromise they could both brook. So far no such agreement appeared likely, and the Senate moved toward its own series of votes that could run through the weekend and perhaps into Monday, just one day short of the Aug. 2 date that the White House has insisted is the deadline for extending the debt ceiling for paying the nation’s bills.

Earlier in the day, at a House hearing, a representative of one of the credit rating agencies said that while the United States was unlikely to default on its obligations, its credit rating could still be cut if Congress failed to come up with a plan to reduce spending sufficiently. In the markets, investors sought alternatives to Treasury bonds and pushed down American stock prices for the fourth straight day as reverberations from the legislative impasse appeared to take a toll. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 198.75 points, or 1.59 percent, on Wednesday; the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index lost more than 2 percent.

Speaker John A. Boehner began mustering support for his budget-cutting plan early in the day as he cracked a verbal whip in meetings with his members even as Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, made it clear the House legislation was dead on arrival in his chamber.

Less than a day after an unfavorable evaluation from the Congressional Budget Office forced Mr. Boehner to delay a vote and rework his bill to gain support, the speaker and other Republican leaders met with their conference Wednesday morning and bluntly commanded that they line up behind the reworked plan to cut spending at least as much as the $1 trillion increase proposed for the debt ceiling.

With the hope of picking up more votes, Mr. Boehner revised his deficit-reduction plan to achieve additional savings of $65 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office said the revised proposal would save $915 billion over 10 years, up from an estimate of $850 billion in savings from the original plan.

The revisions involved technical changes in annual limits on spending in 2012 and 2013, but they produced substantial additional savings.

In a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, Mr. Boehner and the majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, scolded members for allowing Democrats to unify in protest against them. “This is the bill,” Mr. Boehner said, according to those who attended the meeting, who said he advised them to “get your ass in line.”

On the other side of the Rotunda in the Senate, Mr. Reid sent Mr. Boehner a letter signed by all 51 Senate Democrats and two independents assuring that his legislation, which would raise the debt ceiling for roughly six months — far less than President Obama wants — faced certain failure in his chamber. “Your approach would force us once again to face the threat of default in five or six short months,” the letter said. A number of Senate Republicans also oppose the House bill, largely because they find the spending cuts insufficient.

Photo

Tea Party activists have been adamant about deep budget cuts. A small group of them gathered June 27 on Capitol Hill.Credit
Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, reiterated his support for Mr. Boehner’s bill on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “The fact is, Republicans have offered the only proposal at this point that attempts to get at the root of the problem, and which actually has a chance of getting to the president’s desk,” he said.

Mr. McConnell’s aides vehemently denied that their boss was negotiating any side deal with Mr. Reid or that he intended to do so.

Mr. Reid’s package would cut roughly $2.2 trillion in spending over 10 years and raise the debt limit through 2012, according to an analysis from the budget office. “The bottom line is there’s only one bill in Congress that’s a true compromise,” he said Wednesday. “We’re running out of time, and it’s time to get serious about finding that compromise.”

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Despite Mr. Reid’s warnings to the House, rank-and-file House Republicans — scores of whom initially seemed inclined to flee the House bill over what they felt were insufficient spending cuts — fell back in line behind Mr. Boehner, sensing that a compromise with Senate Democrats, which they would less favor, might otherwise be in the offing.

Mr. Boehner made it clear he needed members, even those who believed the bill did not go far enough in cutting spending, to help him avert either a default or Senate victory. “I can’t do this job unless you’re behind me,” people who attended the meeting recalled him saying.

The appeal was apparently effective.

“We’ve got this back and forth between have we cut enough, how much have we cut, how do we get a long-term solution on this,” said Representative James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma. “I like tea sweet enough to stand the spoon up in it,” he said. “This is not super-sweet tea. But it is not unsweetened, either.”

Mr. Reid’s members threw their support behind him in equal measure. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, a leading liberal voice in the Congress, endorsed the majority leader’s plan on the Senate floor, calling it “substantive; it’s real and it’s achievable.”

Mr. Reid’s plan would save $2.2 trillion over 10 years, less than the $2.7 trillion that the Democrats had claimed. Even discounting the savings achieved from winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (about $1.04 trillion) and related savings in interest on the public debt (about $250 billion), that would mean total savings of $900 billion compared with the Republicans’ $850 billion as tallied by the budget office.

Assuming the House is able to pass its bill on Thursday, the Senate has several options. The first is to simply vote to table the House measure, which would likely inflame Republican senators, deprived of the right to have a substantial debate on it.

Another option would be to have a quick vote on the House bill, and assuming it fails, immediately take up either Mr. Reid’s bill as a substitute for the House bill — a procedural move that allows it to be voted over the course of the weekend rather than Monday — or perhaps, some form of a compromise measure drafted with Republican senators, for a Saturday vote.

Alternatively, Mr. Reid could begin the procedural clock on his own bill on Thursday, requiring votes on Saturday and Monday, dragging the process out further.

Carl Hulse and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Support Is Surer For Rival Plans On Debt Ceiling. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe